Mo Yi: Me in My Landscape

From September 28 to December 29, 2024, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents Mo Yi: Me in My Landscape. The first institutional survey of Chinese artist Mo Yi (b. 1958, Shaanxi), this exhibition unfolds across UCCA Beijing’s New, Central, and West Galleries to feature works from Mo Yi’s major photographic series alongside numerous self-portraits, archival materials, handmade artist books, personal journals, and original contact sheets, many of which are exhibited for the first time. With focus on his pioneering conceptual photography of the late 1980s to 2000s, Mo Yi: Me in My Landscape showcases an artist whose work has had a profound, if underrecognized, impact on the development of contemporary art in China. 

The exhibition presents more than 300 black-and-white as well as color photographs from his major series including “1m – The Scenery Behind Me” (1988), “Landscape Outside the Bus” (1995), “I am a Street Dog” (1995), “Dancing Streets” (1998), and “Red Streets” (2003), along with numerous self-portraits (1987–2003). These works represent the beginning of a visible articulation of Mo Yi’s questioning of photography, its form, its definition, and its reception. The artist has also conceived a site-specific installation, River of Time (2024) for the UCCA West Gallery space. To enhance the understanding of Mo Yi’s artistic process, select archival materials, including handmade artist books, personal journals, and original contact sheets, are exhibited for the first time alongside the photographic installations.

Mo Yi rethinks the possibilities of social documentary photography and ruminates on the question of whether photography can properly be art. Some of his best-known works employ inventive methods for taking pictures. The series “1m - Scenery Behind Me” (1988–1989) can be seen as Mo Yi’s first attempt to use a camera as a prop, integrating performance art with photography. For the “I am a Street Dog” (1995) series, he fixed the camera at the end of a modified tripod (monopod) and carried it upside down while walking down a busy commercial street. Randomly pressing the shutter release while walking, the artist’s resulting images convey a hurried, disorderly, off-kilter panorama. With this almost “game-like” approach, Mo Yi flirts with and provokes the pervasive photographic didacticism of his time, creating a body of work far estranged from the mainstream aesthetic. His creative method may seem cynical or anachronistic, but according to the artist, it felt like a true reflection of people’s living conditions. 

A decade later, “Dancing Streets” (1998) conveys movement, rhythm, and the pulse of the city at the transition between day and night. Bicycles feature across the series as they were omni-present in China’s cities during this period±their wheels serve as a frame through which we discover this metropolis in another register. To create these works, the artist fixed the camera to the end of a stick and carries it upside down while walking down a busy intersection. Pressing the shutter release while walking, the resulting images convey a hurried, disorderly, tilted panorama. This series, and its predecessor, “I am a Street Dog” (1995), convey visibly the artist’s dislocation from the documentary photography tradition and his heightened emphasis on engaging in actions and conceptual processes as part of the artwork.

Mo Yi’s work and approach suggest that, like a musician or a painter, the photographer can move with their medium and engage emotion, feeling, and gesture, rather than exclusively relying on their eyes. He also challenges the idea of the photographic image as a singular document, sometimes using groups of pictures to represent a subject. Seen today, these groupings serve as both archival records and expanded expressions of a special historical moment. 

Mo Yi: Me in My Landscape is curated by UCCA Curator Holly Roussell, and co-organized by UCCA Center for Contemporary Art and Rencontres d’Arles International Photography Festival. Exclusive wall solutions support is provided by Dulux. UCCA thanks the members of UCCA Foundation Council, International Circle, and Young Associates, as well as Lead Partner Aranya, Lead Art Book Partner DIOR, Lead Imaging Partner vivo, Presenting Partner Bloomberg, and Supporting Partners AIA, Barco, Dulux, Genelec, SKP Beijing, and Stey.